This column originally appeared in December 2009.
Hoosiers in the capitol city are once again demanding restricted smoking in public places with pros and cons being hurled in every direction including up to the Mayor’s office. Most of the parties involved don’t realize that for five years just after the turn of the last century, Indiana law prohibited all smoking statewide. In 1905 state legislators affiliated with the Indiana branch of the National Anti-Cigarette League introduced a bill banning smoking under penalty of fines up to $500. On February 3 the bill passed the Senate and came before the House of Representatives 19 days later. The measure had been passed by the Senate with the sole intention of embarrassing certain reform leaders in the House; the House as a whole was expected to vote it down in a landslide.
However, right before the vote, State Representative Ananias Baker from Cass and Fulton Counties in Northern Indiana, announced that he had been approached by tobacco interests who attempted to bribe him to vote against the bill. To prove his story, Baker dramatically held aloft a sealed envelope he claimed contained the bribe money given to him by the mighty tobacco trust. He opened it with a flourish and five crisp $20 bills dropped out.
The garish display on the House floor seemed to confirm a prediction by the state’s largest tobacco dealer, reported in an Indianapolis newspaper a few days earlier, that the trust would “buy up the whole House” before it would permit passage of the bill. Baker left his House colleagues little choice but to vote for the bill, mostly because no Hoosier politician wanted the voting public to think he voted against the bill because they had been paid off.
The leader of the anti-smoking forces was Lucy Gaston, a school teacher from Illinois. Miss Gaston formed the Anti-Cigarette League of America and built it into a powerful force in the anti-smoking movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The League was successful in passing anti-smoking legislation nationwide. The organization sought to pass cigarette smoking bans in public places as well as to ban cigarettes themselves. Gastono founded the organization in 1890 and her organization claimed 300,000 members by 1901 with a paid staff overseeing chapters throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Lucy Gaston’s enemies made certain that everyone knew she was a spinster, and one unkind journalist pointed out that she resembled Abraham Lincoln — without the beard. But Gaston had great energy, and was very popular in church circles. Her organization distributed tens of thousands of publications, advancing the idea that cigarette smoking was bad for the health. Gaston maintained that cigarette smoking was a “dangerous new habit, particularly threatening to the young and thus likely to lead to the use of alcohol and narcotics, so prevalent in the 1890’s.”
The main difference between the ban in 1905 and the argument to ban over a century later might surprise you. In 1905, although hazards to the health of the smoker were used in an attempt to scare people away from cigarettes, Victorian-era critics were far more concerned about morality. In a letter to the New York Times, a New Jersey doctor claimed that cigarette smoking “increases sexual propensities and leads to secret practices.” I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination as to what the term “secret practices” refers to, but a hint might be that your mother warned that could go blind doing it. The Times would go on to say, “The practice of cigarette-smoking among ladies seems to be generally regarded as the usual accompaniment of, or prelude to, immorality.”
Newspaper and magazine articles of the era went on to suggest that cigarettes were linked to addictive narcotics such as opium, cocaine and morphine. Rumors persisted that cigarette tobacco was “adulterated” with one or more of those substances, which were at the time essentially unrestricted, unregulated and common ingredients found in over-the-counter medicines. Between 1890 and 1930, 15 states enacted laws banning the sale, manufacture, possession, or use of cigarettes, and 22 other states considered such legislation. In March 1905, Indiana made it illegal to sell cigarettes or the paper used to make cigarettes, and also made it illegal to possess cigarettes.
The first recorded victim of the law was John M. Lewis from Anderson, Indiana who was fined $25 and court costs when he was caught smoking and cigarettes were found in his pocket. Lewis appealed to the state Supreme Court and the law was upheld. However, it was the next defendant prosecuted in Indiana on the cigarette ban law that gained the most attention. It was a chimpanzee named Jocko Dooley, who was charged in 1905 with violating the anti-cigarette law. The arrest undoubtedly was a semi-humorous test of the new law. It seemed that “Jocko the chimp”, who was 15 at the time, had a habit of about 200 cigarettes a day as a main attraction at the Carl Hagenbeck Circus, the same circus that introduced performers Red Skelton, Emmett Kelly and Hoot Gibson. Although records are unclear of the outcome of the trial, there can be little doubt that the monkey was found guilty.
The beginning of the end for the Indianapolis cigarette smoking ban came when Special Judge J.M. Leathers ruled in the case of Indianapolis attorney William W. Lowry (State of Indiana v Lowry, 166 Ind 372; 77 NE 728; 9 Ann Case 350 26 April 1906 re 2-28-1905 ban on cigarette manufacture, sales, and giveaway) that Lowry’s offending cigarette had been brought into the state from Louisville, therefore was an item of commerce, and that the federal law of commerce superseded state laws. In other words, in a legal loophole literally big enough to drive a truck through, a Hoosier could buy cigarettes across state lines and smoke them in private and the law can’t touch you.
Five years later, in 1909, the smoking ban was ended for adults and amended to apply only to minors. In 1973 it was changed to apply to persons younger than 18. In 1977, the ban was lifted entirely. Age restrictions were gradually added until today smoking is “legal” only for those over 18. And now lawmakers are arguing when and where smoking might be prohibited.
As a final aside, to this day in South Bend, Indiana (the scene of the “arrest” and trial of Jocko Dooley the smoking chimpanzee) it is illegal to force a monkey to smoke a cigarette. Yes, it’s truly on the books up in “Fighting Irish” country.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
